William Marquez Bejarano

William Marquez Bejarano — who has signed his work Guillermo Bejarano since the movement years — was born in San Diego, California. He took his degrees at California State University, Northridge in 1975 — one in painting, one in Chicano Studies — and spent a term studying muralism in Mexico City. He came back an advocate for public art in Los Angeles, and has worked on both sides of the border ever since.

Between 1970 and 1975 he worked out of the Méchicano Art Center in East Los Angeles and El Jardín de Flor y Canto in Pacoima. In 1972 he won an open competition through Méchicano to paint a forty-foot mural, Micro / Macro Medical Science, inside East Los Angeles Doctors Hospital. He assisted Carlos Almaraz on a fifty-foot City Scape on Floral Drive in 1980.

From 1976 to 1980 he was part of Centro de Arte Público in Highland Park and El Concilio de Arte Popular, a state-wide coalition of artists and community art centres. He co-published and art-directed ChismeArte, the movement’s art and literary magazine, and 201, a publication for the Los Angeles Bicentennial. In 1979 he was a founding member of the Los Angeles Latino Writers Workshop.

He ran Image Bureau, a graphic arts and pre-press studio, from 1986 to 1995. In 1998 he built one of the first online social networks for Latino artists — Network Aztlán, on Yahoo! Groups — which earned a Mención Honorífica in the Premio Comunidades Transnacionales from CNCA in Mexico City. He was Artist-in-Residence at the California Museum of Photography in 2000.

His work is held in the collection of the Latino Art Museum in Pomona and in the Méchicano Arts collection at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He paints between Laguna Woods, California and Ajijic, Jalisco.